The End (Is Nigh)

Perhaps all of this makes it easy to see what Muldoon meant when he said in his 1979 budget speech that universities are outside the main stream of education. Very soon they will be outside the main stream of twentieth century international university education and Muldoon will have completed his destruction of a system he could never break into.

The tragedy is that NZUSA and other education groups have spent the last third of a century trying to create a society in which all people who qualify and wish to do so can utilise the tertiary education system for their own and their country's benefit. The present government is determined that that will never happen under their rule.

It has taken us 50 years to recover from the disastrous errors made in New Zealand educational funding in the 1930's. Just when we were in a position to move forward again....